Sophia's Journey
by CarrotStix
Summary: After Sophia, Beth, and Noah escape from Grady, they have to team up with a new group to try and find more prison survivors. Along the way, Sophia will have to handle taking care of their remaining kids, deal with the always present threat of death and walkers, and come to terms with a new romance that carries some... complications. [Carl/Sophia Endgame]
1. anyplace is paradise

**hey, welcome to the sophia series! If you're new here, i can understand not wanting to go back and read the first two works, but i can assure you, i'll leave a summary at the bottom of this chapter that can catch you up completely. this is so you don't have to go back and read sophia's return and sophia's suffering, because it may be time consuming and, to be honest, the writing hasn't always been that good. fear not, however, because i am a much better writer than i used to be, and am dedicated to giving you longer, more worthwhile chapters. so stick around, and for a summary of what's happened in the series up until this point, see the bottom of the chapter. thanks, and i hope y'all enjoy!**

* * *

 _two days after grady._

We moved.

It was the first thing we did. With Grady so close, none of us were comfortable being so close to the city. Yes, we wanted to find our group, or at least someone else, but after a long discussion, we came to the mutual agreement that our safety comes first. After all, we couldn't reunite with the rest of the prison if we were dead, or locked up at the hospital.

For the time, it seemed like Jaime and Sylvia's group would be sticking around. They'd helped us, and in times like the ones we lived in, you needed all the allies you could.

As we packed up and prepared to leave, we slowly begun to learn about the rest of the group. There was Jaime and Sylvia, of course, the former being 23, while the latter was 25. Along with them, there was Smith and Alice. The latter was, an older man probably reaching middle age, while the former was a woman in her early thirties at the latest, with cropped brown hair that reminded me of my mother,. Jaime also had a brother who was about a year older than me, who told us he went by Jay, but not what Jay was short for.

There was a kid Luke and Mika's age, too, named Cheyenne. She had been travelling with her uncle, Abbott, who reminded me a little of Daryl, but a little more rude, and somehow even less friendly. He obviously cared deeply about his niece, and seemed to tolerate (like?) the rest of his group. With us, however, he seemed suspicious. I think it helped us that we had Luke and Mika, two kids her age, and a baby who seemed loved and well-cared for. Still, he held us at a distance, but I found it hard to blame him when the first time he met me, my hands were literally covered in a child's blood.

Molly.

Even though we were in a rush, we did take time to bury Molly. For the most part, I dug the grave. Several people offered to lend a hand, but the only one help I accepted was Luke. It was less about needing help, though, and more about the look he gave me. I could tell that he wanted to do it, and maybe he needed it, in the same way I did, so I passed him the extra shovel and we got to work.

It took longer than I thought it would, but between the two of us, we got it done. Together, with the help of Noah and Tyreese, we lowered Molly in the ground. I hadn't been to many funerals, both before and after, but I remembered burying my mom, so I worked off of that..

Each of the kids tossed a handful of dirt into the grave, as did the rest of our group. Tyreese pitched the little makeshift cross he'd nailed together, and Beth read a few lines from a bible she'd found in the home. There wasn't much else for us to say, so for a long while, we stood there in silence, the kids on either side of me. Luke had Judith, arms solid around her and keeping her close to his chest, as if he was trying to keep her safe. At the time, it seemed odd, because he'd asked to hold her. Looking back, I think it made sense. Despite only being eleven, Molly'd cared so deeply for Judy, and maybe having Judith close reminded him of Molly.

We stayed at the house that night, before packing up early in the morning and bolting. Tyreese and I debated whether or not to keep the truck, largely due to the fact that the window was smashed and therefore offered no protection. We decided to keep it, with the reasoning that the truck was so tall, there's no way anything would be reaching in.

Seating became a problem. The night before we left, it occured to me that our big, gray truck only seats six, and if you added Noah and Beth in, that made seven. Someone could hold Judith, but I wasn't quite happy with that.

The other group offered the extra space in their car, and while I was loathe to seperate us, in case something goes wrong, Tyreese and I really couldn't justify getting another car, and therefore having to siphon more gas, when we could just move things around.

In the end, Noah offered to ride with Cheyenne, Abbott, and Alice, and Beth stated that she'd ride with them. It wasn't too horrible of an option, so we went along with it. So, early in the morning, Beth and I managed to properly install Judith's car seat in the back of the truck before we all set out, intent to get out of Atlanta. We didn't want to go too far, not when our group was still out there, but we had to put at least a considerable distance between us and Grady.

Noah mentioned to me the night before we left, when the two of us were keeping watch, that he wanted to go back to his home and check on his family. I was on board, of course, until he mentioned that he was from Richmond, all the way in Virginia. That had thrown me for a loop, considering that it was several states away, until he explained that he and his father'd been looking for his uncle. They hadn't found him in end, and Noah'd gotten quiet after telling me that his father was killed. After a long, pregnant pause, we switched topics and made small talk for another half hour before we woke up Jaime, Tyreese, and Luke to relieve us.

(I was a little leary about having Luke help keep a watch, but he insisted. He wanted to do it, he said, wanted to learn now so he could do it without the others one day. It was fair, and in the end, I didn't have a good enough reason to say no, so he stayed up with the two men.)

Leaving, even though I knew we would be coming back through the city often to look for our group, still made me nervous. I justified it with worrying for our own safety, but it didn't mean I wasn't nervous.

It helped, however, when we passed the Now Leaving Atlanta sign, and I felt the knot of tension in my chest deflate.

We'd decided not to go far, and even though I knew the drive wouldn't be that long, it still seemed unbearably quiet. None of us were in the mood for conversation, which was fair, but after maybe ten minutes, I pulled down the visor above my seat. There was a small piece of faux-leather, with several pockets for CDs. They were mostly hard rock and heavy metal types of music, but among them, I spotted a disc that didn't seem to fit in, and grabbed it.

Elvis: 30 #1 Hits

With a hum, I turned it over in my hands. I wouldn't have said Elvis was my favorite artist before the outbreak, but then again, there wasn't always music going in my house. My dad didn't really care for it, said it drowned out the television. Sometimes, though, when he wasn't home, my mom would pull out her old CD book, the one that with all her albums in it, some of which that held music older than she was. Our stereo wasn't the best, but it played music all the same, and that was good enough for my mom. She'd play all these different artists. I don't remember most of them, but I could remember her favorites. The Oak Ridge Boys, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash. And while Elvis wasn't her favorite (that was saved for The Statler Brothers), she'd liked him well enough, and I'd hear him around the house every once and awhile.

Now, when I slipped it into the disc slot, there was something comforting about hearing a song that was familiar. I didn't know any of the words, granted, but it still felt a little bit like home, in a way. Even though I'd never been the kind of person who listened to a lot of music, hearing Elvis come through the truck speakers made me understand why so many people had cared so much about it.

When the first song had ended, Tyreese glanced over at me. "Not a bad choice," he commented, offering me a small smile that I returned. I shrugged, pushing the visor back up.

In a weather sort of sense, it was a nice day. When we finally pulled away from the old house, it was still a little dark out, but an hour into the drive and the sun was already starting to shine above us. A little ironic, considering the hell I'd been through lately, but it felt a little like a fresh start. Tyreese hummed as he drove, Judith babbled in the backseat, and I even noticed Luke smile in the seat behind me when I glanced in the side mirror.

Our truck led the party of cars. I was fairly sure that Jaime and Smith suggested we go first to give us control over where we were going. Probably because, even though they'd helped us, I couldn't help but be suspicious. They didn't have any more people than we did, if you counted Judith, but we had more kids and were less armed. Just about all of them had guns, compared to the two pistols and one rifle we were carrying.

At some point, Tyreese and I began discussing where to go. There was an aging map of Georgia in the glove compartment of the truck, and although it seemed a little yellowed, it was current. As we took turns, I used a pen from the center console to mark off where we went, so we'd be able to get back to Atlanta easier.

We made it through the Elvis CD a full time, before we decided to start looking for a residential neighborhood. According to the map, we'd reached somewhere between Sne, and considering we were still planning on making frequent trips back to the city, we didn't want to go that far out. True, I knew how to siphon gas, as I'm sure Tyreese and some of the others did, but that doesn't mean I wanted to be doing it every five minutes.

When we started to find the residential areas of town, Tyreese nearly turned into the first neighborhood he saw, but at the last second, I stopped him. He gave me a curious look and I explained.

"Go for one with bigger houses," I instructed.. "Bigger houses means richer families. More bedrooms, better stuff, more space."

He nodded, conceding to the point, and we cruised around for a while before Mika spotted a grouping of houses that looked nicer. Sure enough, when he turned onto the street, we found some houses that were definitely upper-middle class. Even from the outside, I could tell they each had to have several bedrooms, and decent space inside.

For maybe half a minute or so, we drove down the street. I think we were really just waiting for one of the houses to call out to us, but in the end, it was neither Tyreese nor I who picked the house. It was Luke, who jammed his finger against the window.

"That one," he declared, and after a brief moment, Tyreese pulled the truck into the driveway of the home Luke had pointed out. It was red brick, with gray shingles and shutters. Seemed as good as any others along the street, I supposed.

The drive was wide enough for two cars, so Jaime pulled in beside us, and Abbott behind them. Even though it was silly, considering that we were supposed to be trusting them, I couldn't help but be grateful that they hadn't boxed our truck in, in case we needed to make a quick getaway.

I was the first to hop out of the truck, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a walker stumbling up the street. I had my gun on me, but instead, I jumped on the back of the trunk bed and rummaged through a couple things until I found the baseball bat I'd thrown inside. As the kids climbed out, I jogged over to the geek, and made quick work of smashing his head in.

Once it was done, I heard Mika calling my name. Even though her voice was calm, I still spun on my heels, hands tightening on the bat.

"Everything okay?" I asked, heading back towards the truck.

"I can't unbuckle Judith's seatbelt thing," she replied. "The pushy part won't go in."

"I've got it," Beth cut in, sounding amused, before she leaned into the cab where Judy was. By the time I'd made my way over, Beth was pulling her free of the car seat.

"You guys might want to stay in the car," Tyreese suggested. "Or at least outside, while we clear the house to make sure it's empty."

"I can help," Luke offered, and I nearly blanched at the thought. Still, I was quick to recover, and I placed a hand on his shoulder.

"Maybe next time," I told him, and when his face fell, I continued. "At least let me teach you how to shoot first, and then we'll see, okay?"

He sighed, but conceded. "Okay."

Jaime came around to us, everyone else behind him. "What's the plan?" He asked. "Who's going in?"

"I'm in," both Jay and I said, at the same time. Apparently, Sylvia found that funny, because she'd laughed, but said nothing.

In the end, we agreed that Tyreese, Noah, and I would go in with Jay, Jaime, Sylvia, and Smith. Tyreese and I had been completely ready to force the door open, but Sylvia had raised an eyebrow at us all before pulling something out of her back pocket and crouching down by the door. It took me a second, but when I leaned in, I could see she was wedging a credit card into the space between the frame and the lock. After a moment or two of effort, the door clicked, and she pushed it open with ease.

"You gotta teach me that," Noah commented, and Sylvia grinned before stepping inside. We all filed in after her, and fanned out. I started in the kitchen, grabbing a steak knife to use seeing as I had left the baseball bat out in the truck. As I went to move into the living room, there were footsteps behind me, and I whirled around, raising the blade, to see it was only Jay behind me, not a walker.

"Were you about to stab me?" He asked.

"Well, I was when I thought you were a walker," I replied. He chuckled, following me out into the hallway as I moved on.

"You call them walkers?"

I shrugged. "I mean, yeah," I said. "What do you call them?"

"Rotters, or biters," he answered. "But Abbott calls them shamblers. He calls them dickheads, too, but only when Cheyenne isn't listening."

I gave a small laugh at that, as we cleared the living room and started up the stairs. "A guy in my group used to call them geeks," I mentioned, without thinking. After a moment, I hummed, realizing how causally I'd mentioned Glenn, as if he were only a passing thought, and how I'd automatically referred to him in past tense.

Calls them geeks, I corrected, in my head. He calls them geeks.

Jay and I made small talk as we cleared the rest of the house. Mercifully, there were no walkers in the entire house. There was still a car in the garage around the back of the house, and everything looked mostly undisturbed. It was clear that, whoever was living here, they were far out somewhere else. They hadn't packed up their house and left, there were no bodies somewhere else. Maybe they died at work, at school, I don't know, but dwelling on it for too long made me uncomfortable, so instead I pushed it out of my mind.

"It's a nice house," Smith commented, when all seven of us had met back up at the entrance. "Two living rooms, and I counted six bedrooms. Well, five bedrooms, and one that was full of boxes and all. Storage, likely."

"Did anyone clear the basement?" Jaime asked.

"Tyreese and I did," Noah answered.

"Awesome," Jaime replied. "Let's bring everyone else in."

Over the next two weeks, we settled in. The lot of us looted all the houses nearby, gather all the water and salvageable food left behind, as well as anything else worth grabbing. Most of the time, I ended up looking around with Alice or Jaime, who both turned out to be a little more observant than I did. It was Alice who found a shoebox in the master closet of the house across the street, and when she opened it, she found a pistol and a few 9mm rounds inside. In another house, Jaime found an axe in the garage that I'd looked right over and hadn't noticed.

When I scavenged the house three down from the one we're staying in with Jay, however, the two of us found an entire gun safe inside. It was one of the tall ones, the kind people get when they've got more than one gun. Together, Jay and I tore the entire house apart looking for any possible combination of four digits that might work, and when that didn't pan out, we started trying random codes.

After maybe an hour of effort put into opening the safe without any results to speak of, Jay suggested we move on, but I was too stubborn. Instead, we got Jaime and Smith to help us carry it back into the house we were living in, and we set it up in the living room.

"This may be a little much," Jay told me, but I shrugged.

"There's only so many possible combinations, and if we keep trying, we can unlock it," I assured him. "Here, I've got an idea."

Together, we created an order for trying to crack the code. We started with 0000 and went upwards. 0001, 0002, 0003, and so on. After that, we would go 0010, and started back over with the last digit, like we were trying to count higher and higher with each one. Every once and awhile, once of us would wander in and try codes for a while, whether it was for a few seconds or for almost an hour. We tapped a piece of paper to the top of the safe, and would write down whatever the code we'd left off on. It was kind of silly, but at the time, I'd been happy to have something to put my energy into.

After we'd cleaned the neighborhood out of food and other essentials, we started moving mattresses over. The first few nights, we'd been sharing beds and sleeping on blankets on the floor, as well as on the couches in the living room and the den.

Slowly, we started to get comfortable, both around at house and around each other. It was odd, to settle into a routine so easily after everything we'd been through as of late. Our home falling apart, Molly being taken, and everything that happened at Grady.

I missed the prison, though. Missed waking and wandering outside to find Carl helping his father in the garden, missed watching Michonne gallop back into camp on horseback. I missed Maggie's gentle, unoppressive affection, Glenn telling jokes to make me laugh, and Daryl bringing me candy bars when he found them on runs. And I especially missed watching the kids run around in the grass, laughing easy and happy because they were safe. I missed all of it.

There was stuff still at the prison, too. All my clothes, more baby formula and purees. Polaroid pictures of me and Carl that Mika had taken, taped on our walls, my stash of books in the bottom of my nightstand. It was all still there, abandoned in place.

With that, a thought occurred to me. It was all still there. And so was our weapons stash, and there was clean water, and food, and everything. And sure, maybe without the walls and the gates, it wasn't so livable anymore, but… with the group we had, the guns we had, what was stopping us from going back and taking the rest of our things.

While I had been lost in thought thinking about that idea, Tyreese had wandered into the kitchen and noticed the expression on my face. "Sophia? Is everything okay?"

I looked up at him, and as if I couldn't help it, a small smile curled on my face. "Tyreese," I said. "I've got an idea."

* * *

 **alright, so a quick summary**

 **sophia's return [follows the plot of season 3]**

-sophia, instead of dying in season 2, got lost and wandered around the woods trying to survive on her own for ~9 months. somewhere around the first few episodes of season three, sophia stumbles on the prison, and is welcomed back into the prison (& the group) with open arms.

-carl and sophia spend a lot of time together, he teaches her how to shoot a gun, as she's been spending the last nine months running and using knives. (if i go back and do any rewriting, i'm definitely changing this.)

-carl tells sophia that he likes her, and they start dating. carol gets bitten and she dies. afterwards, sophia argues with carl and tries to run away, but he catches her and they stop fighting.

-the governor attacks, carl shoots jody, and sophia is mad about it, but they make up.

 **sophia's suffering [follows the plot of season 4]**

-we follow the time skip between seasons 3 and seasons 4. chapter one of sophia's suffering picks up with the first episode of the season. carl chews lizzie and all the kids out for naming walkers, patrick gets sick, and he turns

-carl and sophia move into the guard's offices with the kids when the illness gets bad. they argue about this, but they make up.

-on april 27th, carl gives sophia a gift for their anniversary. on the same day, the governor rides up to the prison and attacks them, killing hershel. when the shootout starts, carl and sophia separate so he can find his father and she can find judith. sophia finds judith, molly, and luke, and the four of them escape together.

-they spend a week or so on their own before they run into tyreese and mika. the six of them team up, but not too long after, sophia is trying to teach molly and mika to shoot when a van pulls up, starts firing at them, and kidnaps molly.

-sophia manages to fatally wound one of the people who took molly, and they leave the woman behind. sophia presses her for answers and finds that they're taking molly to grady memorial hospital, so sophia chases after her and gets herself kidnapped in the process.

-sophia spends a few days in a coma at grady memorial. during this, beth tells her she has to pretend like she doesn't remember any of what happened, including molly being taken, so sophia lies to the officers when she wakes up and says that she doesn't remember anything past the attack on the prison.

-later, sophia tries to escape grady with noah, beth, and molly. there's a stand off outside the hospital between them and dawn & officer gorman. during this, gorman accidentally kills molly before he's eaten by a walker. sophia convinces dawn to go back inside and let them go, and when dawn turns her back, sophia shoots her in the head.

-they try to walk all the way back to the house where the kids and tyreese are from the hospital. it is far, and they are carrying molly without any food or water. during this, jaime and sylvia pull up beside them, and offer them a ride. sophia hesitates, before accepting, and they make their way back to the house. this is where the sophia's suffering ends and this story picks up

 **alright! so now you're all caught up. stay tuned, i'll be doing updates as frequently as i can manage. and yes, i know you're all still waiting for me to bring carl back. i can't even pretend to be sneaky about it anymore. yes, carl is still alive, and yes, we will see him come back. i miss him too, guys, but i want sophia to have her own arc outside of just being carl's girlfriend.**

 **and yes, carl/sophia is the endgame. they will be ending up together, however long it takes.**


	2. jailhouse rock

**just a note: each chapter title is the name of an elvis song. not all of them from the album elvis: 30 #1 hits, which is the cd sophia found in the last chapter, and some of these song titles are definitely deeper cuts from his library. from the end of the last chapter, and the title of this one, i think you know what's about to go down.**

 **chapter word counts should fall between 3000-5000 or so, but this one turned out a little longer :s**

* * *

 _four weeks after grady._

The first time I had told him my idea, Tyreese looked at me like I was crazy. In hindsight, it was a bit of an out there thing to suggest, but it also had its perks. The weapons, of course, but the supplies, too. There had to be food in there, and we could find some way to bottle up the water as long as the systems were still working. I didn't know the intricacies of how they worked, or if they had been damaged in the fight, so I was mostly running on hope with that one.

When we brought it up to everyone else, they seemed… nervous. I supposed I would, too, but I knew we would need those supplies sooner or later. Sure, we had food for a while, but water was harder to get, and we were starting to run low, drinking sodas and other things we could find to sustain us. Plus, we needed it to make Judith's formula, something we were also starting to get low on. I knew there was plenty left at the prison, had seen it myself, and overall, going back for everything we had there just made sense.

"Didn't you say your camp was overrun?" Alice asked. "Isn't that the whole reason you left?"

"We were attacked," I corrected. "And I'm not saying we move in, especially not since the gates were driven down. But with all of us, we could clear it. There's supplies in there, tons of them. We had a working water system. We had showers. It could very well still work, think about all the water we could bring back."

"I know it sounds crazy," Tyreese added. "But there's plenty of ammunition and weapons inside. We had spare, clean clothes, food for days. It's worth it to try."

After a long moment where all of them stared at us, Noah spoke. "I mean, maybe we could try?" He suggested.

"Are you sure we could do it?" Smith asked.

"I am," I assured them. "I know we could. I've- it's been done once before, when there were even more walkers than there are now."

"Plus, there could be survivors hiding out inside the prison," Beth added, and I knew she was thinking about Maggie and Glenn. "They could be trapped, need us to free them."

"It honestly doesn't sound like that bad of an idea?" Jay jumped in. "I mean, it's a risk, sure, but so is everything these days. And with all those supplies? Think about how set we would be."

"You've got a point," Jaime adds. "I mean, we've got food, but clean water's harder to come by. How many rotters did you say were at the prison."

"I have no idea," I admitted. "I mean, maybe forty or so, less? I was more concerned with getting out of there."

"But we've cleared it before," Beth said. "And there was more walkers then than there is now."

"If you'd cleared it before, why'd you run this time?" Sylvia asked.

"We were being attacked," Tyreese explained. "And we were all separated. We had no idea who was alive and who was dead, all we knew was that we couldn't stay where we were."

"We still don't," Beth whispered.

"How do you know the people who attacked you aren't still there?"

"They aren't," I said. "They were taking just as bad of a beating as we were. They couldn't have made it, and if they did, it would only be a handful of them. One or two, but I doubt it."

We all went back and forth for a while, debating it. Jay is the first one who came around, followed by Alice and Jaime. In the end, we convinced Sylvia and Smith as well, and while Abbott still seemed skeptical, he agreed in the end.

Over the next week or so, we came up with a plan. Mika and Cheyenne would stay back at the house with Noah and Abbott. The rest of us would split up into all three cars and head for the prison. The people without guns would stay in the vehicles, idling in the driver's seat, while we cleared the yard first and then the area around the buildings. Once it was empty, we would have the people in cars come up and we would split off, search the prison. Jay and I would get stuff from my cell first, then Mika's, then move to the guard building. Beth would go to her own cell with Smith, and then to where we kept all the formula, extra diapers, and all the rest of our supplies for Judith. Luke (who I have very reluctantly agreed to let come along) was going with Jaime to his room, then Tyreese's room to grab clothes and such for the man, and then to the library. Tyreese himself was going to lead everyone else to the food stashes, and the armory, where we would all meet back up with them.

When the plan was hammered out, we took a few more days to prepare before we actually set it in motion. Noah and I scavenged through all the houses in the area for every single backpack or duffel bag we could find, tossing them all in the trunks of our vehicles. The idea was that everyone would be able to carry a bag, and once that was full, they would throw in them in the car and grab an empty one, so we could grab as many things as possible.

Mika seemed a little perturbed by the fact that she didn't get to go with us, but she was soothed when I assured her that I would get all her photos and her camera for her. I think she was upset that she thought Luke got to go because he was a boy, and she had to stay because she was a girl, but the truth was that I felt bad that Mika knew how to shoot and Luke didn't, so I was letting him come on the trip to come get his own stuff.

A couple days after we figured out the plan, it was time to go. We ate a quick breakfast in relative silence before loading up in the cars. Tyreese, Beth, Luke, and I rode in the truck there, talking a little on the way.

"Do you think it'll be easy to kill all the walkers?" Luke asked.

"I don't think it'll be too hard," I replied. "They've done it before, and they had to clear out the inside, too. We should only have to clear the outside."

Beth hummed. "Do you think there was still any seeds left? Because I am not opposed to having fresh vegetables, I will say."

I actually laughed at that. "Well, of course you aren't," I teased. "You grew up on a farm, Beth."

She shrugged, but she was grinning anyway. "That's a fair point," she conceded. "I'll give you that."

"I just want to see if there's any ammunition left," Tyreese commented.

Beth seemed to think, before something passed over her face. "Isn't there supposed to be a second crossbow in the armory?" She asked. "I know nobody really used it, but isn't there one in case Daryl lost his or something?"

"I think so," I said. "I know they found one on a run or something, but I'm not sure what happened, if they ended up using it or giving it to someone. Maybe, though."

"I want it," she declared. "Daryl was trying to teach me how to use his."

"Fine by me," I replied. "I just want my gun back. My actual one, not the ones I've been losing and getting like crazy."

"Isn't that in your room?" Tyreese asked, making eye contact with me in the rearview mirror, and I shook my head.

"No," I answered. "When the prison went peaceful, Rick took Carl's gun, and I had to give mine up, too, since we weren't going to need it if we weren't going to be leaving the gates. I grabbed a pistol in the governor's attack, but that wasn't my gun, you know?"

"What was your gun, anyway?"

"A Glock," I replied. "One of the ones with the slots. Rick said it helped with the kickback."

"Huh."

After that, we all fell a little quiet. Tyreese started to hum along to the song playing, as did Beth. Luke fiddled with the knife I'd given him, and it made me miss mine. Unfortunately, while I knew my gun was likely in the armory back in the prison, my knife had been on me when I'd been kidnapped at Grady, and as such, they had it.

(Maybe we'd go back for Grady one day. I hoped to, at least. Now that Dawn was dead, maybe there'd been change, but was it enough? They'd taken so much from us.)

I shook thoughts from the hospital out of my head. The stretch of road we were flying down was mostly trees, but at this point, I was starting to see little things here and there that I recognized, so I knew we were getting closer and closer to the prison. Something rose up in me, but I couldn't tell whether it was nerves or anticipation. Maybe they weren't all that different, anyway.

When I could see the gates, still falling over, I blinked at the sight. I didn't affect to feel so… upset when I saw it, but it was like a physical reminder of what had happened.

Already, hearing the noises of the cars, walkers were starting to take notice of us, looking our way and shambling over. Tyreese reminded Beth and Luke to stay in the car as the two of us jumped out, immediately firing at the closest geeks. They went down easy, and behind us, the other two cars camel to a stop, people flooding out behind us.

It was even easier than expected to clear the prison. Sure, there was more walkers I had expected, but between all of us, there wasn't much of a fight. Honestly, I think the hardest part of it was probably walking up that hill, which seemed far more steep than I remembered it being.

The garden looked worse for wear, but that didn't stop me from checking it out. The animal pen was empty, and the crops were all unsalvageable, after having been abandoned without water as the Georgia heat was just starting to pick up. Still, I poked my head into the garden shed, rooting around for a while until I found what I was looking for: the seed stash. I empty the entire shelf into my back, and even though it wasn't a lot, I still felt a little pleased with the find.

After that, the rest of the group and I started for the main courtyard of the prison. All the fires had long since gone out, the tank included, but that didn't stop me from eyeing it cautiously, as if it would suddenly come to life because I was stood beside it. The area had been cleared, however, and I knew the only thing around here living was me and the rest of the group, but I still felt nervous.

Smith hailed down to the people in cars, and after a moment, they began to drive up the hill. The second they came to a stop, Luke hopped out of the truck's cab, but he froze the second his feet hit the concrete. I couldn't blame him. This place had been our home, everything we had, and watching people destroy it had taken something from us. I'd lost my innocence before the Governor had torn down our gate, but Luke had still been a kid. He'd seen things, but he was still young. Now, I was beginning to think he wasn't anymore, not really.

"Are you good?" I asked him, reaching out to place a hand on his shoulder. He startled at the touch, but relaxed when he glanced over at me.

"I'm fine," he assured me. "I just… I knew it looked bad, but I didn't expect it to seem this bad. The prison just seemed so..."

"Indestructible?" I suggested.

"Yeah," he replied, his voice quiet. "That."

I let him wallow in it for a moment before I ruffled his hair. He gave a half-smile as he batted my hand away, breaking the tension that was starting to settle over all of us.

After that, we split up. We'd agreed that nobody should go alone, just in case, and so Luke, Beth, and I each grabbed a partner and headed into the cell block, while everyone else went with Tyreese.

Those of our group new to the prison, Jay in particular, seemed a little wide-eyed as they looked around, especially at the cell block Beth and I both slept in. The two of us had convinced Daryl and Michonne to grab simple decorations and the like when they went out, and we'd done our best to decorate the block a little. It was still a prison, granted, but it was a little homier. It was our place.

We broke off from each other as we found our rooms. Luke waved to me once before he stepped through the door that led to Cell Block D, and Beth stepped into her own room while I tugged open the door to mine.

Walking into the cell, looking exactly as it had when Carl and I'd packed up and left for the guard building, I was a little stunned. It'd only been two months, less than that even, and still, it felt like walking back in time. The attack on the prison felt like it was somehow a year ago, but also yesterday, giving me a weird sort of vertigo.

Everything was the same. My blanket was still splayed across my cot, less made and more thrown there than anything. The calendar sat on the nightstand closest to the bed, a comic book face down beside it. A basket in the corner held both Carl and I's dirty clothes, and there was still a small rug in the center of the floor, courtesy of Daryl.

And the pictures, too. There was one on the dresser, of Carl, Rick, and Lori, but there were polaroids on the wall, too. Pictures Mika had taken and given to us. To be honest, she took more pictures of us than anyone, but that was partly because we never got upset about her sticking her camera in our faces, and partly because Carl'd been the one to get her most of her film. He'd always loved the idea of having something to look back at, something for Judith to remember.

Taking a step into the room, I made my way to the collage on the wall. There were several images splayed out before me. Carl and I, holding hands. Another one of us, with Patrick in the middle, an arm over each of our shoulders. Judith in Carl's arms, and a fourth of me and Beth, both of us sticking our tongues out at the camera.

Before I even started looking through the rest of my cell, I began to pull the pictures down, being as careful as I could not to rip or damage any of them. Jay didn't seem surprised, and instead, he took a step back, allowing me to work in peace. I was grateful, and he didn't ask any questions until I'd finished.

"Who's that?" He asked. "The guy in most of the pictures."

"That's Carl," I replied. "My boyfriend. Judith's brother."

"Oh."

Carefully, I grabbed the framed photo of Carl and his family, tucking the polaroids inside before putting it in my bag. After a second of consideration, I grabbed the comic book, too. While Patrick had often been the one borrowing Carl's comics, Luke had liked to read them, too.

When I moved onto the dresser and opened the drawers, there was still a few pieces of clothes in there. I rifled through them, staunchly ignoring the idea that Jay might be watching or judging as I grabbed a couple of Carl's shirts alongside my own.

Finishing up in my room, I did one last sweep of it before I left. There was a part of me that wanted to strip down everything and take it all with me, the pillows and the blankets and everything else there was to grab. Instead, I snatched the calendar off the nightstand, mostly on impulse, before leaving without a word.

Jay seemed to accept and respect my silence as I led him down to Mika's room. Her room was in the same block as Luke's, and we passed him on our way out. We made eye contact, but said nothing. Likely, the prison was starting to take a toll on him, too, but I didn't comment. Instead, I made my way up ththe set of stairs and into Lizzie and Mika's cell. It had been right next to their father's before… before Patrick had turned.

Ignoring that, I stepped into the room. There were clothes in neat stacks along the wall, likely because they didn't have a dresser like Carl and I had.

"Damnit," I murmured, glancing over the piles.

"What?" Jay asked.

"I don't know which clothes are Mika's and which were her sisters."

"Oh," he said. "They all look about the same size. Does it really matter?"

"Yes," I replied, a little more harsh than I meant to. "It matters."

"Well, maybe she wouldn't mind her sister's clothes?" He suggested. "Something to remember her by?"

I thought back to Tyreese telling me what happened, the haunted look that took over his eyes. "Maybe not in this case," I told him, and left it at that. After skimming through the folded shirts and such, I was able to pick out things I was sure I'd seen Mika wear before, and used that to figure out that all of her things were to the right of Lizzie's. I had Jay open his bag, and I stuffed as much of her clothing as possible inside of it.

We nearly left the room before I remembered her camera. It was sitting on the nightstand just like she said it would be. As gentle as possible, I picked it up and tucked in inside the little space left inside Jay's pack. Beneath it was her photo album, and I had to fight the urge to pull the cover open, so I managed to squeeze it into my now full bag to avoid looking at it.

"Well, I think that puts us both at carrying capacity," Jay remarked. "Do you want to take these back to the car and grab new ones?"

"Yeah, sounds good," I replied. "After this, we should hit the guard building."

"What's in the guard building, anyway?" He asked, as we made our way back outside.

"More of my clothes, Mika's clothes, some supplies," I answered. "Beth and I were staying out there with a couple of the kids, so some of our stuff is there. Sleeping bags, supplies for Judith, the like."

"Why were you out there with the kids?"

"There was an illness spreading around," I explained. "They moved anyone who had a lower resistance out there. Carl and I went to watch over the kids, Beth came to watch over Judy."

"Huh."

By now, we had reached the cars, and he opened the hatchback of Jaime's to trade out his bag for an empty one. After placing my own backpack inside, I grabbed a spare duffel, and Jay closed the trunk behind us.

"The guard building is the red brick one over there," I said, pointing it out. Jay nodded, picking up his pace until we were both jogging. I think being out in the open, even after clearing the courtyard, was making us nervous, so we hurried a little to the guard building.

Inside, the air felt dusky and stagnant, like it hadn't been disturbed in a while. It hadn't, and while there were some still ajar doors in the prison, cracked spaces in the wall and other things that've allowed the air to move around. The guard building, however, had been shut tight since the attack, and you could practically feel it in the air.

"This is a little creepy," Jay commented. "I mean, the whole prison thing was also kind of off-putting, but… this place has a weird energy."

"We didn't use it much," I said with a shrug. "I mean, they cleared it after they found the prison, but… until people started getting sick, there wasn't a lot of use for it."

"Huh," he mumbled. "Which way are we going, anyway?"

"This way," I directed, leading him down the hallway and to the room we'd been staying in. The door was hanging ajar, and when I pushed it open, I found everything to be the same, much like my cell had been. There were still sleeping bags on the floor, our packs lying around with clothes peeking out of open zippers.

"Grab all the backpacks," I instructed. "Three of them are mine, Beth, and Mika's."

"And the other two?"

"Molly and Carl's."

Apparently, that was good enough for him, because he started scooping them up. I hesitated, before making my way to where I had been sleeping. Carl's pack, a bright orange that stood out in the darker room, caught my eye, and I slipped it onto my back despite the fact that I was already wearing one.

When I reached for mine, however, something slipped off of it and fell to the ground with a quiet clink. It was silver, and small. The locket, I realized, the one that Carl had given to me for our anniversary.

With a small noise of disbelief, I picked it up. The chain was cold to the touch, and it felt delicate in my hands, like I could crush it if I squeezed too hard.

Jay sneezed behind me, snapping me out of my thoughts. "Bless you," I said, rather absent-mindedly, as I shoved the necklace into the pockets of my pants and climbed back to my feet.

"Do you think we should grab these sleeping bags?" I asked

He seemed to consider it for a second, before nodding. "Sounds like a good idea," he decided, after half a minute or so, and together, we knelt down and began to roll them all up. We had to make multiple trips to the car so we could carry everything, but eventually, we had it all gathered up.

As we were finishing up, we noticed Beth and Smith heading our way. They were both carrying things, but while Smith seemed to be carting a large stash of Judith's things in his arms, the blonde was holding something smaller, more oddly shaped.

Beth came closer, and I saw what was in her hands. Brown, wide-brimmed, trimmed with gold. A cowboy hat.

Specifically, Carl's cowboy hat.

When I saw it, I stumbled back in shock, dropping my gun on accident. It clattered to the ground (without firing, thank God), but I couldn't tear my eyes from his hat.

No. No, he can't be… he can't.

Seeing the look in my eyes, Beth raised one hand palm out, as if surrendering. "No, it's not what you think," she assured me, and the breath came back to my lungs. "I just found it, by… by Judith's car seat."

"Judy's car seat?" I repeated. "Why was it there?"

She dropped her gaze, biting her lip. "Her car seat is covered in blood," she told me. "If I… if I had seen it, I would have assumed she was dead. That's how it looks."

"So he… he thinks she's dead?" I asked.

Beth nodded. "I think so."

"Oh."

We stood there in silence, each of us mulling over it in our heads, before Beth reached out and placed it in my hands. My fingers wrapped around the brim, and I stared down at it for a few seconds before placing it on my head. It was a little roomier than I remembered, but it had also originally belonged to Rick, so that was to be expected.

"Suits you," Beth commented, and I did my best to give her a smile, although I'm sure it came out weary. I said nothing as she and Smith began to empty their loads into the bed of the truck, and together, we all made our way back into the prison.

"One of you knows how to get to the armory, right?" Smith questioned, and I gave him a strange look.

"Yeah?" I answered. "Why wouldn't we?"

He only shrugged, and I blinked at him once before shrugging it off. In silence, Beth and I led the other two back towards the weapons stash, and once we started to get close, we began to her distant voices and low conversation. Back here, there was less natural light, and we were mostly depending on flashlights to see now.

The door was open, and when we stepped inside, several people pointed their lights at us, likely expecting us to be walkers. When they realized it was just us, they relaxed, going back to what they were doing. In the dim light, I could just manage to make out who everyone was. Tyreese stood near the rifles, Luke beside him, and both of their heads snapped up when we walked in the room.

When he saw me, Tyreese held something up "Looking for something?" He asked, and even in the lower light, I could make out what it was.

"My gun!" I said, lighting up, and he tossed it over to me with a smile. I caught it easily, glancing over the cool metal for a second. I knew it was silly to develop an attachment to such a thing, especially when such a thing was literally a killer, but they'd given me this when I found the prison. Carl taught me how to shoot with this. This had been my gun.

"Thanks, Tyreese," I called, as I tucked it into the back of my pants. It's weight there was familiar, even after having it confiscated for so long, and I was grateful to have it back.

"You guys sure had a lot of rifles," Jaime commented, shining his flashlight over all the weaponry. I shrugged.

"We had a long time to collect it all," I replied. "And a lot of help."

"How big was your group, anyway?" Sylvia questioned.

Beth hummed. "Somewhere around seventy or eighty, I think."

Jaime whistled, seemingly impressed. "That's a lot of people."

"It is," Tyreese said, but I could tell he was slowly starting to grow a little bit uncomfortable with thinking about that. To be honest, so was I, so when he quickly changed to topic and suggested we start loading rifles into the bed of the truck, I jumped into motion, scooping a few into my arms.

Together, we cleared the entire armory within several trips, including not only the guns, but all of the melee weapons and ammunition. It's mostly rifles, pistols, and knives, but after some deeper searching, we discovered that Beth was right; there is indeed a crossbow and a stash of arrows left here. Despite her normally quieter disposition, she claimed it the second she sees it, picking it up with a sort of reverence I'd never really seen from her before. Nobody saw fit to argue with her, and she slung it over her shoulder, along with the the arrows. Even though she looked nothing like him, seeing it made me miss Daryl a bit, and from the way she seemed to go a bit silent, I'm confident that she was thinking of him, too.

Once the truck is full guns, food, and just about everything else, we all came to a stand still around the cars. For a long, drawn out pause, nobody spoke.

"Is that… it then?" Alice asked, breaking the silence.

"I think it is," Tyreese replied. "Beth? Sophia, Luke? Anything else you need?"

Luke shook his head, as did Beth, but I stopped to think. For a year, this prison had been my home. I'd stumbled onto it, and everyone inside, after being scared and alone for months. It had kept me safe, and it had been my life. Bad things had happened here, but not everything that occured here had been that way.

"I think I'm okay," I said, swallowing down the lump in my throat. "We should get back, so the others don't worry."

Everyone nodded, but still, we hesitated. The other half of the group was waiting on us to move first, but we were all frozen in place, as if we were unable to leave. Finally, someone cleared their throat, and I shook myself out of my thoughts.

"Let's go then," I shrugged, before making my way over to the truck and climbing inside. Luke followed my lead, and behind him, everyone else began to move as well.

Tyreese hopped back into the driver's seat, pulling the truck out of the courtyard and driving back down the path. He didn't reach to turn on the stereo, and I didn't suggest it, either.

As I let my head lean against the window, watching the prison and all of it's memories disappear behind us, I had one thought.

We were going to find the rest of the group. Carl, and Maggie, and Daryl and Glenn and Rick and everyone else. We were going to make more memories.

Even if I didn't share in faith the way Beth did, in that moment, I had never been more sure of anything.

* * *

 **thanks for reading!**

 **also: i know that i've just introduced a lot of new characters that you don't know and have no attachment to yet. i, of course, like them, but i've had a long time to work on them and create them and care for them. so, to help you get to know the new crew, i will be writing short character bios for each of them, and put two at the end of each chapter, starting from the next installment.**

 **ALSO: check out my profile to enter a challenge. if you win, you get to ask two questions, and I will answer them, even if it involves spoilers**


	3. hard luck

_five months after grady._

After our expedition, time starts to blur together.

Not to say it goes faster, because it doesn't. But the days start to bleed into each other and turn to weeks, as we spend most of our days falling into a routine. Some days, it's going on runs, and others, we went back to the Atlanta area to try and find the rest of our group.

The time I spent at the house, though, I did my best to make the most of it. I taught Luke, Molly, and sometimes Cheyenne how to fire and reload both rifles and handguns, as well as the best ways to use knives and such. They all wanted to learn, especially Luke, but I knew I was doing it mostly for my own sanity.

As time went on, I started to get… well, not bored, but comfortable. Most of my days started in the same way, and most of them ended in the same way. It reminded me a little bit of the prison, waking up and spending the day with Carl, farming and reading and just living. Now, however, life was reading picture books to Judith, trying to crack the code to the gun safe with Jay, eating dinner with Beth and Mika.

For the most part, the routine was easy to swallow, and most of us took to it well. The only person who didn't, really, was Noah.

For his part, I couldn't fault him. For all he knew, his group was slowly dissolving in Richmond, and we were all hanging out here in Georgia. As time went on, his nerves seemed to grow, and I couldn't help but feel for him.

"What do you think about Noah?" Luke asked me one day, while we were sat on the floor by the gun safe, trying to crack it open.

"Huh?" I repeated.

"Like, he seems tense lately," he continued, plugging another set of numbers into the pad on the safe. "Like, what do you think?"

"I don't know," I replied, brow furrowing. "I mean, he wants to find his family. And really, that's just what we're trying to do now, except he knows where to go and we don't."

Luke is silent for a minute.

"There's also a lot more of us," he adds, after a while, but his voice is quiet when he says it.

"There is," I agreed, and we lapsed into silence, pressing buttons instead of speaking. Eventually, though, he turned back to me.

"We're still going to be okay, right?" He asked. "You know, if we don't find the rest of the group."

I stopped, pausing to think about that. I'd spent the past month or so putting not only my energy into looking for the others, but Tyreese's, and Beth's, and the kids. I'd stressed that we needed to find them, that it was our top priority. And yes, maybe it was, but with the way Luke was looking up at me, I wondered if maybe I needed to pull back a little bit.

"We'll still be okay," I assured him. "We're going to be okay. Our own safety matters first. We're trying to find them, and we're going to keep looking, but if we don't, or if it takes us a long time, we will still be okay."

Luke nodded, seeming to take a moment to digest that, before shrugging and going back to punching numbers into the gun safe. I had a feeling that he was more so thinking that over than anything else, but I let him have the quiet to process it instead.

For the next two weeks the days continued to go by faster than they really should of. Maybe, as I've gotten older, they've just seemed to blend together due to how inconsequential they all ended up to be, but I digress.

Two months or so after our escape from Grady, we made our first sort of progress on finding the rest of our group, but it wasn't really very uplifting.

We'd been driving down the road, Smith driving while Beth rode shotgun and told him which turns to take, Alice and I sitting in the back. We were doing circles in the area around the prison, trying to pick up a trail, when Beth suddenly shouted " _stop!",_ causing us all to perk up, alert.

Smith pulled the car to a stop, and Beth jumped out. I scrambled to unbuckle my seatbelt before hopping out after her, but when I saw what she noticed, I stopped in my tracks.

In front of us sat the bus, but it wasn't moving. It was still, the doors were cracked, and flowing out of the back doors was a pile of bodies, stacked over each other.

"Oh my god," I breathed, and the sound of my voice seemed to snap Beth out of her head, because she began jogging towards the vehicle, and the corpses around them, so I raced after her. I managed to catch up with her as she reached the bus, and together, we stood side by side and looked at the damages.

From here, we could see the bullet holes, one in each body. Looking at it, we could tell that they'd turned before they'd been shot, due to some of the greying of the skin. That could have also been from long they'd been lying out here, but we couldn't tell just by looking.

Beth seemed more frantic than I did, and she quickly began scanning to see who any of the bodies were. Most of them I recognized as older people from the prison, men and women who I hadn't known very well, but had still been nice to me. They weren't necessarily the ones I'd been most concerned with after the prison's collapse, but seeing them here was still disheartening.

Some of them were lying face down, and we began to flip them onto their backs to see who they were. They, like the others, I didn't know very well, but there was one corpse that both Beth and I hovered over. The back of his head was covered in dark hair, and he built lean, likely young. We hesitated, holding our breath, before Beth reached down and turned him over.

It wasn't Glenn.

Upon seeing this, we both let out twin sighs of relief. Beth bent forward at the waist, half-doubled over, and I placed a hand on her shoulder, feeling myself deflate. Even though we didn't say it, we both knew we were checking to make sure he wasn't Glenn.

As we were standing there, catching our breath, Smith and Alice came up behind us. "Are you guys alright?" Smith asked, seemingly hesitating on his words, but I nodded.

"We're- we're okay," I said, even as the reality of what we saw hit me. I felt my throat tighten a bit, and I had to swallow hard to keep my voice level.

"Is this- I mean did you know any of these people?" Alice questioned.

"We knew them, but not very well," I explained. "Still- they were from the prison. We knew them."

"I'm sorry," she apologized, and Beth let out a soft, defeated noise. We all stood there in silence for a long moment.

"Maybe we should call it a day," Smith suggested, and after a moment of hesitation, I nodded. We'd been out for a good while, and even though we'd usually go for a few more hours, I was willing to give in. Right about then, I just wanted to head back to the house and go to bed, which is exactly what I did when we got back.

We didn't find anymore people over the next two more months or so, but something exciting did happen. Maybe seven weeks after the bus incident, I was moving things around the kitchen, trying to unpack some of the food I'd found on a run the day before, when I heard my name being shouted.

"Sophia!"

When I heard it, my head shot up, and I jumped to my feet. I didn't waste any time in following the voice, but I was caught off guard when, instead of seeing someone in danger, I just found Jay crouched on the floor by the gun safe.

"What?" I demanded, unable to keep some of my irritation out of my voice, but it melted away when Jay gave me a broad grin as he swung open the door to the safe.

"Ta-da!"

I gasped, scrambling to his side to peek at what we'd just discovered. True, I knew we were pretty well armed after clearing out the prison armory, but this was more about the sense of accomplishment that came with finally opening this thing up.

The interior of the safe seemed a lot smaller than the outside, but that might have been because of how thick the shell was. Inside though, there were three guns. One was a handgun, placed on the highest shelf with several 10mm rounds. Below it, there were two rifles, nearly identical in every way, balanced in a way that had them standing up, and on the floor of the safe, there was ammunition for said rifles.

"Oh my god," I breathed. "It's open."

"It's open," he echoed, and even though he was smiling, he seemed a little awed. To be fair, I felt a bit stunned as well. We'd been trying to get this open for a good long while now, and at this point, I was beginning to think we never would. And yet, here we were.

Jay seemed to recover himself, and he reached out for one of the rifles. "Dibs," he said, as his fingers curled around the barrel.

"Fine by me," I replied, grabbing the other and inspecting it. The metal of the muzzle was sleek, and as I brushed off some of the dust, I could see that it was well-kept. The stock and forestock were made of deep, dark reddish wood. It looked like it wasn't necessarily used often, and had instead been kept like a trophy or a possession instead of a weapon. Still, as I looked it over, it was clear that it was a good rifle, and had been taken care of well.

"Do you know what model these are?" Jay asked, and I shrugged.

"No idea."

After looking them over for another minute or two, we went off to show the others. Save for Abbott, Tyreese, Sylvia, and Smith, everyone had stayed in the house today, and when we walked into the second den, we found Jaime and Alice sitting there and talking.

"We got the safe open," Jay announced, holding up his rifle. Jaime looked up, and Alice's eyebrows raised.

"Nice job," she complimented.

"Nice _guns,"_ Jaime added, glancing at the matching weapons we were holding. Showing off, Jay turned a little to the side to give his brother a full view of the rifle.

"Aren't they?" He said, puffing his chest out. I rolled my eyes, adjusting my grip on mine so that the barrel was resting upside down on my shoulder.

"I mean, we didn't really need them since we cleaned out the prison," I admitted, shrugging a little bit. "But still, cool that we managed to get that safe open."

"The ammunition, at least, was worth it," Jay tacked on. "Plus, these guns are great. Well-kept, look nice, the whole nine."

"You guys did good," Jaime congratulated. We talked a little bit more, before Jay and I made for the room where we'd been storing non-food supplies. There were backpacks, tents, and sleeping bags lining the walls, as well as other sorts of camping gear. Across the back of the room, there was several melee weapons, and two dressers that we'd filled up with all sorts of guns and ammunition. A little reluctantly, Jay placed his gun inside of one, and I placed mine in beside it before sliding the the drawer closed.

"You'll see it again," I assured him, when I noticed him pouting. "But in the meantime, do you want to round up the kids and play a board game or something?"

"Only if it's Clue," he replied, but he seemed to brighten, setting up the game while I managed to rope not only Luke, Mika, and Cheyenne into playing with us, but Noah and Beth as well. This made seven of us in total, while there was only six game pieces, so after a short deliberation, Mika and Cheyenne decided to team up.

We spent the rest of the night playing games. Noah beat us in two of the three rounds of Clue, but Beth managed to pull a win for game number three. After that, we moved onto monopoly, which ended up being a long game that ended with Jay nudging me into bankruptcy while Luke cheered him on. By the time we were done, Tyreese and rest of the run group were back, and we all settled in to eat a quick dinner before splitting up for the rest of the night.

When the time for heading to bed rolled around, Beth headed off to the bathroom to try and give herself a makeshift shower with a package of baby wipes, leaving Mika and I alone in the room all three of us shared with Judith.

We were settling into bed when Mika spoke, her voice soft. "I miss Lizzie sometimes," she admitted. "Is that wrong?"

The question caught me off guard, and I blinked, trying to think over an answer. Lizzie was a tricky subject, and we didn't really talk about. The last time we'd ever really spoken about it was the night Tyreese had confessed to me what happened, long after the kids had gone to bed.

" _The girls were outside, and I heard a scream. So I ran outside, expecting there to be a walker. Instead, I found Lizzie, trying to attack Mika with a knife. I panicked, pulled my gun and started yelling for them to stop, and when they broke apart, I asked Lizzie, you know, what the hell was going on? And she told me that she wanted to prove that the walkers, they were people, too, so she was going to kill Mika and let her turn. It… it turned into this whole argument. Next thing I know, Lizzie takes off towards the fence, and there's… there's this walker there, and she just- just shoves her arm and shoulder into it's mouth before I can even shoot it. And it just bites her._

 _I wanted- I wanted to try and cut her arm off, to do something, but the bite was too high. She kept telling me it was okay, that she was still going to be fine, just now she was going to be a little different. Up until the end, she was sure everything was going to be fine."_

" _And then?"_

" _And then, when she died, I… made sure she wouldn't turn."_

I thought back on what Tyreese said before speaking. "I don't think it's wrong," I told her. "It's okay to miss your sister, Mika."

"She tried to kill me," Mika whispered, and the heartbreak in her voice was haunting. "I know she didn't think it counted, I know she wasn't- that her head was sick, like Tyreese said, but… she still tried to kill me. And then she _died."_

Her voice broke on the last word, and she started to cry. In the dim light coming through the window, I could see her on the other side of the king bed, curling her knees into her chest, so I sat up and scooted over, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. She leaned into me, and I could feel her body shaking.

"She just _died,"_ she sobbed. "She _left_ me all alone."

"I know," I murmured, rubbing her shoulder. "I know, it's hard, and it hurts, and it's hard to understand. But even though it's confusing, and painful, you don't have to feel bad for missing her. She was your sister before she tried to hurt you, and you loved her."

She nodded, and I continued. "And you are not alone," I added. "You have me, and Beth, and Tyreese and Luke and Judy and everyone else. You're one of us, and we all care about you. And I know that, as long as you need us, we'll do our best to be there for you, okay?"

"Okay," she whispered, and I let her calm down for a moment, before she pulled away and began to crawl under the covers. I curled up beneath my own blanket.

In the darkness, I turned towards her. "No matter what, you've got me," I assured her. "And I've got you. Capiche?"

"Capiche," She echoed, and that was the last thing she said before she started to snore ten minutes later.

As I fell asleep, I thought of family, of my mom and Judith, and Carl, of Maggie and Sasha, and I realized that we needed to hurry up and find a time to go check for Noah's family, but that turned out to be for naught.

The next morning, I woke up to find one of Mika's legs sprawled over my chest, and both Beth and

Judith were gone, likely downstairs already. Yawning, I managed to slip out from under Mika's limbs without waking her, and padded down to the kitchen.

When I got there, I found several adults, along with Beth, standing around and seeming grim. Instantly, the looks on all of their faces alerted me to the fact that something was wrong, and without speaking, Jaime passed me a ripped piece of paper covered in scrawl. Right away, I began to read it.

 _Everyone-_

 _I know you said we would be trying to find my family soon, but it's been a long time. I know you all have family to find to, and I get that, but I can't stand here while I don't have any idea of what's happened to my own, either._

 _I didn't take much with me. Just some of the food, some water, and a weapon or two. I took a car from one of the nearby houses so I didn't steal any of yours. I hope this isn't the last you hear from me, but right now, I need to look for my family. Once I find them, I'll figure out what to do. Maybe we can all move there, once you've found more of your people. Maybe it'll be more safer for all us then._

 _I hope this isn't the last time we see each other._

 _-Noah_

Once I finished, I set the paper down and took a heavy sigh. "Do we go after him?" I asked.

"No," Sylvia replied. "He's made it clear what he wants, and we can't go against that. We just have to hope that he gets there safe."

As I dropped my head, I only had one real thought.

This _sucked._

 **sorry for the crazy delay, I've been trying to prewrite for a lot of the chapters and, well, some changes were made. BUT all good things, all good things. the same five people are still surviving, btw, so if you wanna guess, go ahead. nobody has guessed it correctly yet, but someone got _really_ close.**


	4. return to sender

**this chapter is a little weaker than the others but we need it for plot reasons. and i hope that the familiar face we see at the end will make it up to you.**

* * *

 _nine months after grady._

After Noah left, it didn't really change anything. We stayed in the house, we continued to go on runs. The days started to drag on, the longer we went without finding anything, the more I began to get disheartened, hoping for a sign, for anything.

It felt like we tore up all of Atlanta looking for any of our people. I dragged Jaime, Abbott, and Jay through the old remains of Woodbury, just in case. Tyreese discovered a place called Terminus, but when his group followed the path there, they found it destroyed and abandoned, signs of a gunfight all over the place. He'd looked inside, but when he stumbled upon what looked like the remains of a human slaughterhouse, he turned around and left, queasy. Apparently, there were bodies all over the place, but many of them had been torn into by walkers, all in gross states of decay and ripped apart.

We thought about going after Noah, and we debated it several times over. Beth was adamant that we had to follow him, and I was trapped somewhere in the middle. In the end, we let him go. There was no way to figure out just where in Richmond he was going, and we still had responsibilities here. Plus, if it didn't work out, he might come back here looking for us, and if we weren't here when he did, we'd have no way of knowing he was back in Georgia.

After a good, long debate, we came to an agreement. If, six months or so after he left, he wasn't back, we'd drive to Richmond and try to find him. It was a compromise that, in the end, we decided we were happy enough with. It put a limit on how much time we had left to find our people, to find anyone. As a result, I started going out with the run team more, taking less breaks, spending less time at the house and more time trying to find survivors from the prison.

Four months, four long months, we went without any ideas, any real plans. We spent all of our time driving down old Georgia streets, covering parts of the city we hadn't before, and even retracing over places we had seen. For four months, we just kept on keeping on, and the longer we did so, the more drained I began to feel, and the closer we got to the six month deadline, the more anxious I got.

Until, of course, Beth realized something.

Early in the morning, when the sun was just starting to come through the windows, I woke up to Beth standing over me, her hand shaking my shoulder. Weary, my eyes blinked open to look at her, doing their best to focus on her figure even though they were still blurry with sleep.

"Can I help you?" I mumbled, moody after being woken up. As my vision cleared, I could see the look on her face, and although I couldn't read it, it did register as odd.

"Grady," was all she said, hand still clutching my shoulder, and suddenly, I was a lot more awake.

"What about it?" I asked, sitting up a little in my bed.

"We never cleared it," she said. "Never went back. Like, it was dangerous, but what- what if they've found more of our people? What if they're there, and we leave in two months, and they're still trapped at Grady?"

"Beth…"

"Plus, what they were doing? It's wrong. We can go back, and we can stop them! Dawn is _dead._ Gorman is dead. We can get them to change! And if they won't, well… we can free all the other patients that are still there. Maybe some of them will want to come with us!"

I stopped to think about it for a long moment. She had a fair point that more of our people could be stuck in the hospital, and we'd have no way of knowing. And I knew myself, and Beth, for that matter, we'd always be wondering if the rest of our people were still there if we didn't check.

I nodded, a silent sort of approval, and Beth gave a smile, even if it did seem a little bit like a grimace.

Later, when almost everyone had woken up, we gathered them all in the kitchen so Beth could repeat what she'd suggested to me.

When she first mentioned what she'd been thinking, there was a lot of skepticism, likely about the fact that her idea involved going back to a place that we'd barely managed to escape from with our lives, especially after the encounter that left Molly dead. Beth, however, used a lot of the same reasoning I'd had when it came to clearing out the prison: that now, we had the manpower and the weapons.

"And what if we don't find any of your people?" Abbott asked, folding his arms over her chest.

"Even still, Grady is a corrupt place where most people there are being held against their will," I interjected. "The least we'll be doing is running through and seeing if they've made any changes since Dawn was killed. And if not, well… we figure out what to do then."

"Plus, there are plenty of patients inside who would leave in a second's notice if they could," Beth added. "We could always bring them with us. Having more people can't hurt."

The conversation went on for an hour or so, before we got the majority of people on board. Many of them still seemed a little hesitant, but all risks had their rewards. It didn't hurt that Beth seemed so dead set on going, and the more I thought about it, the more I agreed.

We decided to take two days or so to work out the details. In the end, since both Beth and I wanted to go, Alice would stay with the kids this time. The rest of us would all be loading up and going to Grady. Luke had wanted to go, too, and had argued with me over it for a long time, but I was firm on the fact that he wasn't allowed to come with, and neither was Mika.

(I didn't realize it at the time, but I think this is the moment when I became the de-facto parent for both Luke and Mika.)

In the end, he'd huffed and pouted, but I wouldn't budge, and in the end, he seemed to get over it. I knew he wasn't happy, but I figured he'd get over it.

The day of, we loaded up to leave. We only had to take two vehicles to fit us all, one of those being the truck, which meant that there was one car left for Alice and the kids to make a break for it.

Before we left, I said goodbye to Mika, Judith, and Alice. Luke had run off to his room after breakfast. I shouted something up at the stairs to him, but when he didn't come back down, I figured I'd give him his space. Instead, I hopped up into the front seat of the truck, powered up the stereo system, and we set of for Grady.

The drive there was a little less than two hours, which wasn't too long, but I did feel nervous. Beside me, Beth seemed to feel the same way, and mostly on impulse, I reached out grab her hand. There was a moment of hesitation before her fingers laced through mine, and she squeezed them.

We rode the rest of the way in silence, save for the soft Elvis music playing from the speakers. About half a block from Grady, Tyreese pulled the truck to a stop, and Beth dropped my hand as we all got out, planning on walking the rest of the way.

The hatchback parked behind us, and everyone else began to climb out. What took me by surprise was when they popped the trunk and Luke slipped out, a pistol in his hands and a rifle on his back.

I blinked, confused, before emotion took over. "What are you doing here?" I all but demanded, before turning to Jaime, who had been driving the car. "What is he doing here?"

Jaime threw his hands up in front of him, as if he were surrendering, and Luke stepped forward. "I hid in the trunk," he told me. "I wanted to come."

"I _told_ you to stay at the house!"

"You're not the boss of me," he argued, and that had me stumped for a moment, before I set my jaw.

"Well, someone has to be," I replied. "And listening to me has helped keep you safe for this long!"

He shrugged, and I wrinkled my nose. "You're waiting in the car," I stated.

"You can't make me stay there," he pointed out. "And once you leave, I'm just going to get out and follow you. I could get hurt doing that, you might as well just let me come along."

I sighed, realizing he had a point. "Fine," I conceded. "You can come with. But you don't fire a single shot unless someone else does first, and you listen to everything we say, got it?"

"Got it," he repeated, looking far too smug. I huffed, but said nothing else, and we began to head for Grady. It seemed to loom before us, and I swallowed, glancing back over my shoulder at Beth. She met my gaze, and despite the nerves itching in the bottom of my stomach, the steady look in her eyes helped to calm me, just a little bit.

When we hit the courtyard, I fought down the wave of memories that surged up in my head. Here was where I shot Dawn, where Molly was killed. It still stung to think about, but I pushed on, my rifle raised and scanning the area. There was a walker or two milling about, but Jaime and Abbott took them both down with melee weapons, keeping it quiet.

The hospital doors were closed, but not locked, and they came open easily enough. From here, Beth and I took point, leading them up the staircase.

"Do you think they know we're inside yet?" Jay asked.

"Probably not," Beth whispered back. "They don't make much use of our the lower floors. They'll probably be a guard at the top of the staircase on the fourth floor, though."

She turned out to be right, because when we hit the top, we found Officer Tanaka. He startled when he saw us, raising his gun, but he realized very quickly that he was outnumbered.

"Beth? Sophia?"

"That would be us," I said. "So here's the deal. You're going to pull out your walkie talkie, call all the other officers, and we're going to have a meeting in the cafeteria."

"I'm- I'm not in charge," he stammered. "Officer Shepard took over after…"

"It doesn't matter who's in charge," Sylvia interrupted from behind me, and I was glad for the way she spoke in a solid, even tone, commanded attention. "What matters it that we greatly outnumber you and your friends, and if you don't all want to be dead for the horror show you've been running here, you're going to call them all together, and we're going to talk."

His eyes went wide, and he reached for his walkie right away, talking into it at low tones. As he spoke, he continued to glance back and forth between us and our guns.

"Yeah, it's important," he said. "I- Beth and Sophia are here, with like- a lot of other people. And they're all armed."

" _How many of them are there?"_

"More than there are of us," Tanaka answered, and I had to fight to keep my lips from curling up at the corners.

Despite the fact that Beth and I both already knew where the cafeteria was, we let him lead the way there. By the time we arrived, there were several officers already gathered around. Upon seeing us, many seemed taken aback, but others reached for the weapons.

"Don't," I all but hissed. "Keep them holstered?"

"Oh, or you'll shoot us?" a voice demanded, and I looked over to see O'Donnell standing there. "Like you did with Dawn?"

"No," I spat back, feeling something angry rise in my chest. "I'll shoot you like Dawn shot Gorman: while he was writhing on the ground and begging for mercy!"

That seemed to shut him up, and his lips curled into a snarl. I didn't say anything else until everyone else trickled in, Officer Shephard the last of them.

"Sophia, Beth," she greeted, in an almost mechanical tone. "We didn't expect to see you back here."

"We weren't plannin' on coming back," Beth said.

"Yeah, it might have been a poor plan, considering that you murdered Dawn," Licardi spit. "Shot her in the back of the head while she was walking back inside."

I growled. "You have no idea what happened out in that courtyard," I sneered.

"Yeah? Well, what I know-"

"What _you_ know is _nothing,"_ I interrupted. "What _I_ know is that Dawn let you all abuse people and destroy lives, commit rape and murder and all kinds of horrible things. What I know is that Gorman held a girl, a _little girl,_ with a knife to her throat, and when he cut it open, Beth and I were the ones with our hands on her neck, trying to stop the bleeding. What I know is that Gorman murdered Molly, Dawn let it happen, and I shot her for it."

A long period of silence followed my words, and in that stillness, I realized that my breathing had become heavy with anger, and my finger was itching too close to the trigger of my gun, cool metal against the pad of my pointer. There was a hand on my shoulder, likely Tyreese, and I forced myself to take a deep breath and calm down.

"Look, no matter what, there's as many of us as there are of you," Smith stated, taking a step forward until he was only a foot or so behind me. "And you may have police training, but you've been holed up here in this hospital for the past few years. We, however, have been surviving on the road since then. We've more than got you matched."

"So?" Shephard cut in, before any of the other cops could speak. Her voice was still calm. "Why are you back? What could you want?"

"We're here for the patients," I said. "We're taking them, any of them that want to come with us."

There's a bit of an uproar at that, a scattered "you can't do that" and "that's crazy", but we wait it out. When they realize we're serious, they seem almost offended.

"They're people," Beth added. "People who deserve the control their own lives."

"There's no way," one of the other officers said, one whose name I didn't care to remember. "There's-"

"Okay," Shepard agreed.

I was so shocked by her agreement that I almost dropped my rifle right there, but instead, I narrowed my eyes. "What's the catch?"

"No catch," she insisted. "You're right. We were police officers. We're supposed to be the good guys, we're supposed to help people. What we're doing isn't helping people. So yeah, take whoever wants to come with you."

I almost didn't believe her. I really didn't. But there was something in her eyes, earnest and impossible to deny, and I knew in that moment, she was telling the truth.

"Guys, she's not lying," I whispered, turning back to the rest of the group.

"She isn't," Beth repeated, sounding almost awed. "She's telling the truth."

Caught off-guard, we all froze before our brains kicked into action. I glanced over at Beth, and when she looked back at me, I could see a mix of confusion and shock that I'm sure was reflected in my own eyes. The two of us stared for a moment, before I realized that I was waiting for her reaction, waiting to see what she thought. She seemed to realize it, too, and she offered me a small dip of the head: agreement.

Shepard, seemingly starting to get either irritated, or nervous, spoke up. "So? Are you in or not?"

Shifting my rifle on my shoulder, I glanced over at Beth before I nodded. "Yeah," I said. "We're in."

One of the other officers, Lam-something, placed his hand on Shepard's shoulder. "Are you sure about this?" He asked, and although he was trying to be quiet about it, it was pretty obvious what he had to be saying. Shepard brushed him off with a bit of a shrug, and started to send off her people to gather all the patients up.

Finally, when the only two cops left were her and Bello left, the other woman hovering along the wall in silence, Shepard turned to me. "How have you guys been?" She asked.

Taken aback, I scoffed. "Did you just… did you just ask me how we've been?" I repeated, incredulous. "Seriously?"

"Look, I don't hold any sort of negative feelings for you," she told me. "Either of you. Yes, you killed Dawn, but it need to happen to put new people in charge."

"Puttin' new people in charge hasn't seemed to do much," Beth pointed out.

"Just because I run this place now, it doesn't mean I have total control over everything that happens here," Shepard replied. "I'm trying to change this place, and we're making progress, but everyone has been set in their ways for a long time now. I want us to be better, but it doesn't happen overnight. It takes time."

"And nine months hasn't been enough time?"

"I don't want to fight with you. You came into this hospital with guns-"

"This hospital that kidnapped us-" I interrupted, but she cut me off.

"-And you demanded something from me," she continued. "And now, instead of arguing over it, I'm giving that to you. Can that not be enough, at least for today?"

"There's no 'enough'," I said. "There isn't 'enough' to justify the blood on your hands."

"Then why are you even here?"

"Some of my people could be here," I told her. "But even with them aside, there's others in this hospital, too, who you've taken, who deserve better. They had lives before this place, and they should get to have lives after it. We're here for them."

Shepard went quiet, considering that. "Fair enough," she replied, after a while "But for however little it's worth, I'm sorry about what happened to you here, and what happened to Molly."

I didn't have a response to that, but Beth did. "Thank you," she said, her voice soft.

As a couple patients began to trickle in, Shepard scanned her eyes over our group, as if just realizing something. "Where's Noah?" She asked.

"He went to go find his family," Beth answered, saving me from having to try and come up with something to say. Shepard seemed to take that as it was, and the conversation fizzled out from there as more and more people began to make their way into the cafeteria. Eventually, there was a small crowd gathered, some of which I recognized, and some I didn't.

I turned to Shepard. "Is this everyone?"

"For the most part," she answered. "There's a couple more, but you may as well get started, or whatever you plan to do."

I shrugged, before turning to the patients, most of whom were staring at me and Beth. "Um, hey guys." I greeted, suddenly feeling a little bit odd addressing them all like these. "You might know who I am, you might not. But my name's Sophia, and this is Beth. We were both injured and kidnapped, like I'm sure most of you were. I don't really know how it works now, but when I was here, they never let us leave.

"We managed to escape, and now we're here to offer that chance to you. Our group is willing to take in any and all of you who want to escape. We have a safehouse, we have weapons, food and water. We believe there's safety in numbers, and that the trick to surviving isn't pushing people down and building on their backs, it's about working together and caring for each other."

By now, the crowd was starting to murmur among themselves. "You're welcome to come with us," I finished. "If you want to get out of Grady, here's your chance."

At that, they all went quiet, giving each other wide eyed looks and glancing around. After a long moment of silence, a woman I only vaguely recognized stepped forward.

"I want in," she said, and took one glance at Officer Shepard before crossing the room and walking over to Beth and I. A second behind her, a man came forward, also coming over to stand by us.

"Anyone else?" I asked.

There was silence, but then: a few, squeaking taps, like rubber on a tiled floor, and a familiar voice said: "Yeah, I think I'd like to come with."

The voice came from across the room, warm, with a distant sort of familarity, the kind that only comes from seeing someone you love after a long time. Just hearing the voice, I thought of comic books, and warm laughter with bright eyes, and-

I looked over and, leaning on a crutch with hair falling into his face, was Glenn.

Beth's eyes went wide, and his name fell from her lips. Smiling, she rushed forward and threw her arms around him. Grinning, I jogged up behind them, and when she finally let him go, I reached out to hug him, a little bit more gentle than she'd been.

"You have no idea how good it is to see you," I whispered.

"Same here," he echoed, with a soft laugh.

When I pulled back, she reached out to place a hand on his shoulder. "Have you seen Maggie?" She asked, a hint of desperation leaking into her voice, and Glenn's grin faltered

"I was going to ask if you'd seen her," he replied. "We were at Terminus together, but we got seperated."

"Terminus?" I repeated, before glancing at Tyreese over my shoulder, who had come up behind me. "Isn't that the name of that place you found?"

"Yeah," he answered, brow furrowing. "It was totally destroyed. You were there?"

Glenn nodded. "I think I have a lot to tell you guys."


End file.
